THE ERA OF THE FERNS 
We may imagine that the shores of the early Devonian 
seas were covered with plants of the psilophytales type. 
But we are bound to conclude that more highly developed 
plants also existed at the same time, because in the later 
Devonian period we find stems of trees many feet long 
and more than two feet in diameter. These could not 
have sprung into existence overnight. 
In the State Museum at Albany, New York, there 
is a reconstruction of a later Devonian forest which is 
much more complete than anything we have from the 
earlier period. It is based on remnants and fossils found 
near Gilboa, New York, which have given us a fuller 
knowledge of the plant life of that period. The recon¬ 
struction is painted in the background, while actual rocks 
and petrified stems from Gilboa fill the foreground. The 
restored forest, which is based on most accurate studies 
of the fossils, shows trees more than thirty feet high, but 
otherwise little different from the ferns of our age. 
An interesting feature is the presence of seeds on some 
of these tree-ferns, which make them the connecting link 
between true fern plants and seed plants. The existence 
of such a connection, between two now widely separated 
types, in the early Paleozoic age has been emphasized 
in an earlier chapter, where this type was called pterido- 
sperms. They are thus known to be as old as the true 
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